Chapter 18 #2
There had never been a next for her, no after.
How had she never noticed it? The queen had showered her with praise songs and titles, but never land or tithes.
Lovers had been tolerated, but never marriage or children.
Men might follow her into battle, but never be sworn to her service.
There had never been any provision for her future because she had never been intended to have one.
But now the future hung on the vine, hers for the taking, and she found she was ravenous for it.
She dropped the pill to the earth and ground it dispassionately beneath her heel.
The scholar gasped. ‘But how—we couldn’t raise a baby, the way we live.’ His voice was miserable with want. ‘Wherever we went, she would find us, eventually.’
‘Unless we go where she never was.’ It was an argument they’d had before. But—before—it hadn’t seemed worth winning. ‘Unless we went back further, before all of this.’
Now the scholar’s hands were running frustratedly through his own hair.
The knight liked the way his curls looked afterward, startled, harassed.
‘And what if we forget everything again? What if the book doesn’t even go back that far?
What if she anticipated us, and she’s waiting, somehow, before you were even born? ’
The knight had learned that it was best, at these times, to let the scholar argue both sides against himself. He paced and gestured while she watched. ‘Although … without the book, how would she ever travel to us, even if she suspected where we’d gone? Suppose I tested it, first, just in case—’
Eventually the knight caught his hands in midair and tugged him down into her lap.
‘We could settle here in the woods, long before I was born. Before even my fathers were born, or Yvanne! I could build a fine home for us, you know I could.’ This was true; there were few kinds of work they hadn’t taken, in their years of travel, and even fewer she hadn’t taken to.
She looked up at the thatched roof of the cottage and added, musing, ‘Father Theo said he found it standing empty when he first came to the woods. It might be this very house that I build for us. Perhaps I already have.’
Still the scholar hesitated, until the knight took pity on him and said, in the same voice she used to drive men into battle, to make them forget their fears and fight for victory rather than mere survival, ‘Please.’
And he answered, in relief, ‘As you will.’
And so they broke the second rule.
They ran again, further than ever before, to a time when the woods belonged to no one, when Dominion was not even a whisper of a dream, and the yew was so young the sun could fall cleanly through its canopy.
For a moment they stood wondering and disoriented, but then the scholar said, ‘No.’
The knight turned and saw it buried in the bark of the yew: the hilt of a sword. The sword she would pull from the tree as a young girl, a century from now, which had been placed there like a stage prop by the wicked queen. The wood had already swelled around the metal, like an unlanced boil.
‘But if it’s here, this far back—then Yvanne must have been here before us. We’re not safe, we’ll never be—’ the scholar broke off, swearing.
But the knight studied the hilt carefully. Then she drew a knife from her hip and cut the rotted leather wrapping away. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘No mark.’
The scholar looked and saw that it was true; the tang of the sword was perfectly smooth.
His brows arced and furrowed as he thought.
‘If it’s not a Saint Sinclair … then it’s not one of hers.
Perhaps there really was a sword in a tree—the stories about Valiance certainly predate yours—and she merely made copies, later. Perhaps she never came this far back.’
The scholar chewed at his lips, fretfully.
The knight put her knuckle beneath his chin and tipped his face up.
‘Even if she did, she cannot return here without the book, and she will not have any reason to try, because she will never hear of us.’ The scholar swallowed, wanting badly to be convinced.
The knight said, ‘There is no crown and no country here. There are no legends about a lady knight. We are safe, the two of us—three, I suppose.’
At this, the scholar buried his face in the soft hollow of the knight’s throat and wept.
The knight stroked his back, soothingly, and did not look at the sword.
Eventually the scholar took her hand and pulled her away from the yew, toward the clearing where they would build their home.
She told him about the fen where she would dig the clay for their walls, the hazel copse where she would cut the wattle, the distant farmstead where she might find wheat for their thatch.
They would be simple folk of the forest, and such people had no need of swords.
The cottage was finished well before the cold came, and they’d only cheated a little.
If it rained, they traveled a few days later, when it was dry.
If the wheat was too green, they took it with them a few months back, and left it to cure.
The scholar made a single, furtive trip into the early modern age, returning to the yew with a bow saw and mallet, an ax, and a good sharp augur.
He also brought a cheap mirror, which he hung by the wash bucket for shaving.
The knight found herself moving carefully around it, keeping her back turned, until one day her own reflection caught her unawares.
She was still herself—big and rough, badly scarred—and yet different.
Changed. The line of her jaw had softened with fat.
Her hips had widened, and her belly and breasts pushed against the rough wool of her dress.
She had always been a woman, she supposed—but she’d never looked like one.
She didn’t mind it, really. She had found ordinary skirts much easier to manage than court dresses, and she and the scholar both liked to run their hands over her belly like cartographers surveying a brand-new country.
And yet—she felt something like grief, that her child would never see her in full armor.
He would only ever know her in hiding, half disguised.
The scholar came home then and found her looking at her reflection as if it were a stranger in their home. He took the mirror down without saying anything, and neither of them mentioned it in the months that followed.
It was midwinter when the knight felt the first ripple of labor.
She looked out at the bare gray branches and decided that she wanted her child to meet the world when it was warm, and the sun was shining.
So they traveled to spring, as other people might travel to the sea or the market, and their son was born, sudden and pink and slick, beneath the yew.
His hair was thick and curling, but so pale it could be mistaken for a caul. He had very fine fingers, long and delicate as willow branches, and a round birthmark, red as a yewberry, on his left foot.
The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.
They named him—but no. You asked for mercy. I will not make you remember his name.